In His Shoes

Manolo Blahnik shoes regain It status in fashion world

This is the tale of the little stiletto that could,a shoe that in the long-ago days of the luxury-goods boom scampered to the top of a rarefied heap. It was just a handful of years ago that the name of Manolo Blahnik,a 68-year-old London cobbler born in the Canary Islands,was familiar only to hard-core fashion hunters and residents of ZIP code 10021.

Then a funny thing happened: Sex and the City. As man-crazy as the character Carrie Bradshaw was on the series,she was just as obsessive about what Vanity Fair once termed every womans favourite phallic symbol,shoes. Lust for footwear seldom featured as a continuing TV plot line before the show came along. Yet such was the shoe-mania of the character played by Sarah Jessica Parker that,merely by name-checking Manolo Blahnik,she made his a household name. One sign of the familiarity American women developed with Blahniks classically styled shoesso comfortable,some claimed,you could wear them to scale Everestwas a 2007 survey by Womens Wear Daily and the trade journal Footwear News. Soon after the survey appeared,Blahniks name and label took a style dive,his often kittenish designs supplanted by the more aggressive efforts of a new crop of shoemakers,people like Christian Louboutin.

It was Louboutin who most effectively hijacked Blahniks thunder and a chunk of his market,using an arsenal of gaud and ostentation,shoes that came studded,strapped,buckled and fur-covered and that were also made instantly identifiable by his signature red soles. Even among those closely associated with the iconic Blahnik shoe there was a sense that the tide had shifted. A time came,Parker said,when Manolo wasnt defining the aesthetic, when Blade Runner styles took over from smart patent pumps,and wearing Manolos was almost like announcing one had turned in ones coquette card and started taking style cues from Judge Judy. Blahnik,notoriously indifferent to fashion trends,stayed true to an aesthetic that he said was formed in his 1950s boyhood by women like Audrey Hepburn. The gimmicky thing Im not very keen on, Blahnik said last week from London. But fashion,as we all know,is nothing if not fickle. So it should come as no surprise that,suddenly,signs are everywhere that Blahnik is back in style. When Kate Moss married last summer,she was shod in a pair of classic Manolos. When Parker was photographed in a multipage page pictorial for last Augusts Vogue,she wore Manolos BB pump exclusively.

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The reasons seem clear. Not only did the cult of the ugly shoe have to end, as André Leon Talley,a contributing editor of Vogue,recently noted,but unbridled ostentatious spending has come to look a lot less chic when nearly 1 in 10 Americans is unemployed. Fashion had to turn on its ugly heel and return to beautiful shoes, Talley said,citing among the appealing elements of Manolo Blahnik shoes their sleek lines and absence of gimmickry. For classic,timeless Jackie O dressing,its always back to Manolo, said Lisa Bytner,a Manhattan publicist who owns 20 pairs. In Manolos,say fans like Bytner,I can jog down the street and run for

a taxi. Arriving for her Vogue shoot last spring,Parker entered a dressing room filled with the latest styles and a wall of shoes secured for the sitting by Tonne Goodman,a seasoned editor at Vogue. I looked around and saw all these shoes,and then I spotted the Manolos and it was like water in a desert, Parker said. I was just so excited to see a simple black pump.GUY TREBAY

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Kurnool bus accident that killed 20 caused by drunk biker, says forensic report

India1 hr ago

A forensic report has concluded that the Kurnool bus accident, which claimed 20 lives, was caused by a drunk biker, B Shiva Shankar. The biker was allegedly driving under the influence when his bike skidded on a wet road and collided with the bus, causing it to burst into flames. The police have gathered evidence and the investigation is ongoing.

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